Journal Article

This article was written for the Caramoor Antiques Show Journal, October 2004.

Botanical Prints
A Fresh Interior Firmly Rooted in the Past

The Roman statesman Seneca is known to have said “All art is but imitation of nature.” The art of printmaking has been emulating nature – flowers, plants, fruits, and trees - since the late fifteenth century, when graphic processes were first developed. With a history stretching over 500 years, how have botanical prints remained as interesting and fresh today as they were in the beginning?

The answer lies in the words of Seneca. In their attempts to create art that imitated nature, printmakers have always turned to nature in its most accessible form: the garden. The development of botanical prints, then, is closely linked to the evolution of gardening itself, as styles of botanicals reflected changing garden fashions and, eventually, had their own impact on garden design.

This trend dates to the very earliest botanicals. In medieval times, everything in the garden had a medicinal or culinary use, and any aesthetic pleasure derived from the plants and flowers was secondary. This utilitarian approach to gardening carries over into prints. Early botanicals were produced as part of herbals, books which documented the names and properties of plants. Many of the most talented botanical artists we know today were not artists at all, but rather apothecaries and physicians. One of the most famous of these is Basil Besler; although today we value Besler’s engravings for their beautiful design and coloring, the graphics were originally intended to be more scientific than aesthetic.

The Renaissance brought the new idea of the pleasure garden. Italian gardens came to be considered an extension of the house, a place of enjoyment as well as function. This shift prompted the development in the print world of florilegia, books depicting different varieties of flowers with little or no text, intended not for the botanist or physician but for the garden lover. With the age of exploration, many of these florilegia became devoted primarily to depicting new plant species imported from the New World and the Near East. Each florilegium functioned as a sort of elaborate version of the modern catalog; gardeners examined the prints in order to decide which flowers they wanted.

The best known example of this is the “tulipomania” that swept through Europe during the early 1600s. The tulip originated in Turkey and first came to Europe during the sixteenth century. What began as a fascination with the new flower quickly developed into a craze in the Netherlands, with rich and poor alike growing tulips in the hopes that a random variation would result in a new species of the flower. At first actual bulbs were sold but eventually the mania became pure speculation. Such trade practices meant that tulip books became necessary so that Dutch merchants could show potential buyers what they were purchasing. Tulipomania peaked in 1634, with single bulbs selling for as much as houses and families gambling their entire fortune, and finally collapsed in 1637.

The seventeenth century saw the spread of the grandiose French style, as seen in the sweeping lawns and tree-lined alleys of Versailles, but by the end of the eighteenth century English gardens had come to the forefront. Flowers and plants were blended back into the landscape and the garden became more personalized, leading to the novelty of botanical periodicals. The first and most successful of these was the Botanical Magazine founded by William Curtis in 1787. Henry C. Andrews followed in 1797 with The Botanist’s Repository. The variety and abundance of the illustrations in these periodicals makes them perfect for decorative purposes.

This return to prominence of flowers and plants at the end of the eighteenth century gradually formalized into the Gardenesque style promoted by John and Jane Loudon. The couple believed that each flower should be displayed to its best advantage, and Jane herself was one of the most popular botanical artists of the nineteenth century.

While the Renaissance saw the makeover of the garden into an extension of the home, today we are bringing the garden inside with botanical prints. Antique graphics take on a new dimension by bringing their rich history and individual beauty into the contemporary home.